"Turkish Muscle"

I really don't like selling my fiction to online-only publications, and I've only done it a couple of times previously: "The Lords' Prayer" appeared on the Kings River Life website in 2016 and "Father Knows Bets" was on Shotgun Honey's the following year ... and that was it until 2026, when, after this story was rejected by several other markets, I sent it to John Betancourt at Black Cat Weekly on October 28, 2025, and he accepted it the same day.

The story is based extremely closely on the Gate 1 Turkey tour Laurie and I went on in October 2024. The unnamed narrator and his wife Lisa are Laurie and me, most of the participants — the six Cubans, the three Indians, Rosie and her son Steve — are based on people who were actually in our group, tour manager Mehmet is our tour manager Metin, and "Dick the dick" is a composite of the annoying couple Don and David we all spent the entire two weeks wondering about, since they clearly hated pretty much every aspect of the tour. The itinerary is also day by day identical to ours, right up to the visit to the underground city of Kaymakli.

One key difference between our tour and the one described in the story: on our tour, nobody got murdered....

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